Returning to train after an injury is not merely coming back to the routine you used to have, it is somewhat more complicated since we do not intend to injure ourselves again or worse.
More and more people are running, the shoes we run in are better, and the professionals who carry out the training are more specialized, but the number of injuries continues to increase. Why?
The Best Kept Secret to Avoid Injuries and Become a Better Runner
Few people have not been injured or felt pain throughout their lives, even if they are not athletes, in many cases, this situation conditions our sports practice because it prevents us from continuing to train or compete. But what if we don’t have to stop training? We would have to take into account our injury and adapt our training to improve the current state.
From this action the term “Readaptation” arises, which is defined as the teaching-learning process by which the general and specific physical-motor patterns of an injured athlete are restored and improved, facilitating in the shortest possible time, a state of optimal well-being that guarantees the incorporation to its habitual activity with normality and directed for the effort in the training and the performance.
Currently, when we have physical discomfort or an injury diagnosed by a doctor, it is common to go to the physiotherapist to return us to a state where we can train, but the coach must also be part of the recovery process since he has to adapt the training to the injury.
Many factors can influence your injury recovery; the most important are:
- Strength training: You will have heard the phrase: “we run to be fit, but we must be fit to run” and it is true if our body is not prepared we are very likely to get injured. A healthy physical condition based on strength will make our body ready for the impact suffered by the joints, among other functions.
- Fatigue: Controlling the training load is essential to know the level of fatigue that causes us since it is decisive if we want to give up. Overtraining causes us to be tired during the day, and our body does not function properly, increasing the risk of injury. Before quantity, think of quality. Many runners have excess loads, which cause them to injure.
- Treatment: Listen to the professionals, respect the recovery times, and make a progression in our training is the key to not getting injured again. This point emphasizes that once we get injured, we have a much higher chance of getting injured again.
When you ask a health professional if you can run injured, and the response is “go for a run and if it hurts stop” or “run slowly until it starts hurting,” will ensure that we are going to be injured since this is not the process to follow. Advice from professionals who show us the right path and schedule the rehabilitation to follow is essential. Our desire to retrain after an injury can cause us not to respect the times, be patient.
Other factors that can influence the occurrence of an injury: the sport you practice, technique, gender, age, stress, previous injuries, genes, decompensations.
A proper medical diagnosis, physiotherapist treatment, and re-training will be the keys to the total recovery of our injury, and that is why communication between these three people is the key to success.
If more health professionals got together, it would be great, a nutritionist, psychologist, podiatrist, depending on the injury.
Currently, this multidisciplinary work is challenging to find, and that is why there are more and more private centers that involve more professionals and more and more specialized care.
The most common injuries we can find are:
- Tendinopathies
- Muscle injuries
- Bone lesions
- Ligament lesions
- Cartilage
Each of them has some risk factors and a different recovery process.
My experience has made me see the importance of having a coach who knows the injuries, and we have several articles about it, mainly to avoid injury and run better.
